Many modern speech coders belong to a large class of speech coders known as LPC (Linear Predictive Coders). Examples of coders belonging to this class are: the 4,8 Kbit/s CELP from the U.S. Department of Defense, the RPE-LTP coder of the European digital cellular mobile telephone system GSM, the VSELP coder of the corresponding American system ADC, as well as the VSELP coder of the pacific digital cellular system PDC.
These coders all utilize a source-filter concept in the signal generation process. The filter is used to model the short-time spectrum of the signal that is to be reproduced, whereas the source is assumed to handle all other signal variations.
A common feature of these source-filter models is that the signal to be reproduced is represented by parameters defining the output signal of the source and filter parameters defining the filter. The term "linear predictive" refers to the method generally used for estimating the filter parameters. Thus, the signal to be reproduced is partially represented by a set of filter parameters.
The method of utilizing a source-filter combination as a signal model has proven to work relatively well for speech signals. However, when the user of a mobile telephone is silent and the input signal comprises the surrounding sounds, the presently known coders have difficulties in coping with this situation, since they are optimized for speech signals. A listener on the other side of the communication link may easily get annoyed when familiar background sounds cannot be recognized since they have been "mistreated" by the coder.
According to swedish patent application 93 00290-5, which is hereby incorporated by reference, this problem is solved by detecting the presence of background sounds in the signal received by the coder and modifying the calculation of the filter parameters in accordance with a certain so called anti-swirling algorithm if the signal is dominated by background sounds.
However, it has been found that different background sounds may not have the same statistical character. One type of background sound, such as car noise, can be characterized as stationary. Another type, such as background babble, can be characterized as being non-stationary. Experiments have shown that the mentioned anti-swirling algorithm works well for stationary but not for non-stationary background sounds. Therefore it would be desirable to discriminate between stationary and non-stationary background sounds, so that the anti-swirling algorithm can be by-passed if the background sound is non-stationary.
Swedish patent application 93 01798-6, which is hereby incorporated by reference, describes a discriminator capable of discriminating between stationary and non-stationary signal frames representing background sounds. However, this discriminator uses a significant amount of signal processor memory, which is a scarce resource. In one embodiment the memory requirements have been reduced, but this embodiment is sub-optimal.